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Three Ashbury College students win national pitch competition for AI-backed startup Ribn

December 6, 2024

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During the summer between grades 10 and 11 at Ashbury College, Reese Shu was not doing what a typical 16-year-old does. Instead, she was spending every weekend developing an idea for an AI-backed startup called Ribn, a service that helps users find gifts for people who are difficult to shop for. The service prompts a user to answer basic questions about the gift recipient and asks about the user’s budget. Then, the user is shown one gift at a time and is asked to rate it so the algorithm improves and knows better what to look for. The end result is a range of gifts, with affiliate links to buy the perfect gift online. Shu and her partners, Ashbury grade 12 students Aiden O’Reilly and Bupa Zhang, met at coffee shops for hours to go over every aspect of their new business idea, from tech to finances. The Ribn team then started looking at ways to grow. Zhang suggested they apply to the Queen’s University Young Entrepreneurship Competition, a Canada-wide event for high school students to showcase their startups to investors and mentors alike. “I had a friend that participated in the competition last year, so I heard about it pretty early on. I was going to compete with another group but (Shu) showed me (Ribn) and I saw that this company has a future because of how good the idea is so I joined them. Then, I invited Aiden,” Zhang said. This past summer, Shu, O’Reilly and Zhang recorded a video as part of their application, where they took to the streets of the ByWard Market to conduct interviews with 37 people about their thoughts on their product. In their first week alone, they made $334 in profit from their prototype. It reached 18,000 people on social media. Things were looking up. Then they received confirmation that they were finalists in the pitch competition, which meant it was full steam ahead for preparation, all while participating in classes and activities at school. The pitch event took place in November, during the Queen’s Leadership, Entrepreneurship, and Development conference in Kingston. O’Reilly said they took every opportunity to perfect their pitch, even leaving a party at the conference to go through everything one last time. “We snuck out of the party to sit in the hallway (of the hotel) with a computer on the floor … We were practising our pitch on the car ride there, over and over again,” he said. Even though they felt confident, O’Reilly said they had such a strong competitor that they did not expect to win. “We were absolutely shocked. When they were announcing (the winners), we were talking like, ‘Oh, he deserves to win this,’” Shu said. When they won, O’Reilly said it wasn’t just a win for them, it was a win for Ottawa. “I think there were probably three or four other delegates out of the hundreds that were there who were also from Ottawa and we didn’t even know them but, after the win, everyone was coming up to us to celebrate … It was a win for us, yes, but it was a win for Ottawa on the national stage, which was huge,” O’Reilly said. “Toronto usually dominates the competition, so the fact that Ottawa came in and actually won the whole thing was pretty cool.” Shu, O’Reilly and Zhang came back to Ottawa richer, in the form of a $1,000 cheque and priceless mentorship. This has motivated them to continue and get their product out to clients. Now, Shu said they are working on launching their product, hopefully by mid-December, in time for the holiday rush. “We don’t have a specific time because my co-founder in California is still working on it. He’s working on launching a scrappy version of the service, just to have something running through the high traffic of December. We’re hoping to gather as much feedback throughout the months of December and January. We’ll be making tweaks throughout … our real pivot will be mid-January once we have enough feedback,” she said. Shu said she and the team have long-term plans to transition the service from a B2C model to a B2B model, hopefully acting as a sidekick to e-commerce sites like Amazon. “We’re trying to be the middleman, but that is a long-term vision. For now, we’re just looking to launch and have this tested out,” she said. As they grow, Ribn will be what O’Reilly calls a “freemium” service, where users will have a one-time free trial and then can subscribe for $4.99 a month to continue using the full range of Ribn’s services. In coming years, members of the Ribn team will be off to post-secondary institutions where they plan to study business, in the hope of bringing their learnings back to Ottawa. O’Reilly said opportunities like the Queen’s pitch competition are vital to supporting young entrepreneurs as they begin their foray into the world of business. “You see higher success levels in the future for young people, because they’ve been nurtured and coached from the beginning. It’s vital for our community to have, so fostering that in youth is absolutely necessary if you want to see that success,” he said. Zhang said opportunities like these are also important because people underestimate the ideas that come from young people. “I feel like in our society, there’s not many opportunities for youth, and that’s because some people don’t believe that youth are able to do capable things. Having events like these show that some youth are really hard-working and motivated to do great things,” he said.